by Phil Rickman
‘And you told him… what?’
‘We told him nothing. We knew nothing. The ones who might’ve known were long gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Everywhere. Some to Bristol, London… France even, the more devout of them. Where they might practise their faith unmolested. However, someone must’ve told Leland about all the time the abbot spent with Cate.’
‘So that was how Leland met Cate?’
‘No, they… they’d met before. When he was here to chronicle the antiquities. I believe he’d gone lame in one foot, and she or Matthew attended him. When he returned in forty-five, though, he was a different man. A man possessed. Made a nuisance of himself, I’d guess.’
Can still see his beardless face, all bony like a Roman statue. I remember him shouting, ‘You don’t understand, I’m my own man now.’
Of a sudden, this made sense to me: Leland seeking to assure Cate that he was no longer working for the Crown, that whatever she told him would go no further.
‘When you say possessed…’
‘Only that he was in thrall to this town and its peculiarities.’
I remembered what Nel had told me her father had thought: that Leland’s first visit was to collect treasure, and his second was to collect the place itself. This might simply refer to the notation of its features. Yet knowing of Leland’s interest in the hidden…
‘This secret that Leland believed the monks kept, do you think Cate knew what it was?’
‘I can’t say. She was certainly closer to the abbot than anyone outside the abbey – and closer than most of us inside.’ He wiped rain and maybe sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his dark brown robe. ‘I must needs go back, Dr John. I go to my old mother’s on a Sunday.’
‘Joe… what are you’re not telling me?’
‘Nothing that can help you. Nothing I know.’
He began to walk away, and although I’d known him only a short time I knew this was not like him. I didn’t move. After about ten paces, he turned back to me. Hesitated for a moment and then cried out quickly, ‘Talk to Joan. Last hovel on the left, top of town, past the alehouse.’
Then turned, stumbling, dragging his cowl over his head and almost running back to the town through the rain, all his old composure gone.
Why?
Joan Tyrre’s house might once – and not too long ago – have been a stable or a winter sheepshed, built of mismatched timbers and rubblestone, with two open doorways and chickens pecking around in the straw. Inside, another door was patched with wads of grey wool, probably plucked from hedgerows and brambles. It opened into the place where Joan lived.
‘Shillin’?’ she said. ‘Seein’ it be Sunday and I don’t work, normal way of it. Howzat zound, Master Lunnonman?’
Bringing down from a niche in the wall above the fire, with some reverance, her skrying crystal. I knew not how a woman of her limited means might have come by it. It was small but of good quality, near as clear as my own. I tried to convey to her that I would not be troubling her for a reading today.
‘Sixpence, then?’
‘Mistress Tyrre…’
I took from my pocket a new shilling, placing it on the boards which made an old manger into a table. The place was cleaner than I might have expected and the strongest smell was from the iron stewpot hanging over a grizzling fire which fugged the air with smoke.
‘Ahaaaah.’ Joan broke out a toothless smile. Then she was putting down the crystal to unwrap her shawl and loosen the faded garment that covered her bosom. ‘This be what you—’
‘No! I … I just… I just want to talk to you.’
‘Talk?’
‘Talk.’
Joan settled back into the sheepskins lining her bench. Light came through cracks in the shutters and the smoke-hole ’twixt the rafters.
‘You en’t easy with a woman, is you? I feels… a real moylin’ in you. You’ze shook up real bad. Real bad. En’t that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘’Tis a woman, no doubt ’bout that. A woman in there, sure as I be alive.’
‘Mistress Tyrre, I don’t know what you’ve heard…’
Joan pulled her shawl back around her bony shoulders, adjusted her eyepatch, peered at me through the smoke.
‘Joe Monger, he d’say you’ze a gonner plead for Nel.’
‘I’ll do anything that might…’
I swallowed.
‘You’ze a good man,’ Joan said. ‘I feels that. An honest man, if only enough folk knowed it, and a kind, zad face on you. But the zaddest thing…’ She looked up into the smoke, nodding slightly. ‘The zaddest thing of all… they en’t never gonner know, most of ’em. Now.’ She picked up the shilling, sat back in satisfaction, arms folded. ‘You ass me what you wants, boy.’
‘Tell me about the faerie,’ I said, of a sudden.
Not knowing where the question came from. Sometimes there’s an instinct of what will open a door.
XLV
Eye
THE FAERIE WERE real. As real as the people in the street. As real as her own family. And closer. She’d heard them since… oh, a long time back, maybe since around her first monthly bleeding.
The voices of the faerie.
I said, ‘What kind of voices?’
Joan was hunched like a winter bird on a fence.
‘Man’s voices, woman’s voices. Tellin’ me to do things… things as got me in bother with my mam. ’Tis what they does, the faerie, tests you out, look, puts you on your mettle. And round about then it started. I knowed things…’
She leaned forward, a smell of mint around here.
‘Things as I shouldn’t know. Things what folks done.’
She was enjoying telling of it. It struck me – although I was wrong in this – that nobody had ever asked her these things before. She went and stirred the stew in the pot with a long wooden spoon and tasted some and came back and beamed at me in the meagre firelight, a brown dribble on her chin.
‘My mam, her throwed me out!’ she said proudly. ‘Her said I knowed too much, look.’
‘Because you told her things? Things the faerie had told to you?’
‘Things I knowed.’ Joan put her face close to mine, the one eye boring into me until I flinched. ‘Only, I said it were the faerie. You gettin’ me? It was what I learned was best, look. Allus tell ’em ’twas the faerie, then you don’t get no blame.’
‘But you knew…’
‘Pah. I was young. I tells meself it were the faerie. Made it easier. Only it don’t, Master Lunnonman. In the end it surely don’t. You put the blame on the faerie, the faerie an’t gonner like it… then you’re deep in the shitty.’
It had been bad when they took her to the church court in Taunton. All of it thrown at her. What the faerie could do to you if you fell into their thrall. How they could take away your sight. When she confessed all before God and they let her go, folk feared her. Pointing at her in the street. Piles of turds left outside her door. Dead rats.
And the only ones who came to her now were bad folk, who wanted the faerie to harm other folk, exact revenge for some slight. Once or twice, she was so hard up that she took their money. And then whenever folk died and it wasn’t obvious why, they were pointing at her.
And all this time, the voices were at her, chittering in her head, waking her up in the night… and, just like they’d warned her in the church court, her sight growing dim, and then one eye… the faerie took it.
Joan lifted away the eyepatch. There was only a pit of skwidged and puckered skin.
‘Wouldn’t give me no rest, look. Screechin’ do it! Do it! Sendin’ me out in the woods to the faerie tump, and there on the top… nice sharp stick, and I done it there and then! Aaaagh!’
Joan grasping a bony fist with her other hand, slamming it at the ruined eye.
‘Jesu!’
‘Hadda get away, Mr Lunnonman. Went in the night with all I could pack into an ole shawl.’
So this wa
s what came before the flight to what Joe Monger had called the more openly mystical humours of Glastonbury. A town where friendship with the faerie might win you a welcome in some homes.
Of course, even in Glastonbury, she was still thought a little mad, this bird-boned woman building her rude shelter on the tor. The difference being that these people, who had grown up with divers kinds of madness, at least found her harmless. Notably Cate Borrow, who’d taken her in and then found her work with an old woman of some means, who’d died not long afterwards, leaving Joan a little money, enough to get by for a while without recourse to a misuse of her abilities.
But when it ran out, Joan, encouraged as ever by the voices in her head, had turned again to the faerie. And to the tor, where lived the king of the Faerie. And, having heard at the market about the dust of vision, she’d gone, as Joe Monger had told me, back to Cate Borrow.
‘Why else was I come here, look, if not summoned by the Lord Gwyn?’
Joan cackling, then springing up for another taste of her stew. When she sat down again, I made no attempt to hurry her. Oft-times, unusual talents are to be found among those cast out by society. When I was at Cambridge, one of my bolder tutors took me to a hovel in the fens, there to consult with a wild-eyed old man said to be possessed of the ability to summon the spirit of Hereward the Wake and speak with his voice in the old Saxon. The hovel stank to heaven, and the man was clearly deranged in his mind… yet I heard him speak in a younger man’s voice and knew enough of Anglo-Saxon to translate his words of glee at ever evading the Normans by becoming near invisible in the marshes.
And so to the tor at All Hallows.
‘What happened?’ I said softly. ‘Can you tell me?’
‘Dunno.’ Her eye glancing away at a strange angle. ‘Dunno.’
I said, ‘Joe Monger spoke of me, did he?’
You’ze a good man. I feels that.
‘Nothin’ happened, Master,’ Joan said. ‘You gettin’ it? Nothin’.’
I tried again.
‘The farmer… Moulder? He told the court at Cate’s trial that you’d been howling to the moon. Something like that. This was before Cate said she was alone, and Moulder told the court that the others must therefore have been spirits.’
‘’Twas me and her, was all,’ Joan said. ‘We never done no howlin’. We was quiet. Quiet as the dead. Her showed me how to sit, look.’
‘What about the potion?’
‘Potion, Master?’
‘The potion of the dust of vision.’
‘Never gived it me. You gettin’ this?’ Joan’s eye all over the place now. ‘Her never fuckin’ gived it me.’
‘Then what…?’
‘Us sat an’ talked, look. Sat an’ talked till dawn. Like I en’t never talked before and never since.’
‘What about?’
‘The faerie. The voices. Her says to me the voices wasn’t the faerie. Her says the voices was just voices. Her says the Lord Gwyn and his kind wasn’t for tellin’ nothin’ to the likes o’ me. Her says if I needed someone to talk to I oughter talk to the Lord Merlin, who dealed with the faerie all his life.’
‘What did you think to that?’
‘Din’t know whadda think. Up there by the ole tower, ’twas real quiet, it being All Hallows. Her showed me how to sit. Her said all the stars was out, but I couldn’t see none of ’em. My eye… real bad by then. Only made it to the top holdin’ on to Mistress Cate’s arm, couldn’t even see the path. But we’s sittin’ there, and her’s tellin’ me ’bout what the Lord Merlin seen – all the folks and the creatures in the stars.’
‘The creatures…? Oh, the constellations.’
‘What?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Go on.’
‘Her just talked, and I seen ’em in my head. The ole voices… I could still hear the voices, but they was a long way away. I felt real peaceful, look, and all I remember after that was the dawn a-comin’ up, and the mist, look, a big white mist, thick as you like, all round the hill, and when we looks down we can’t see nothin’ but white, and it’s like we’re on…’
‘An island? The way it used to be.’
I was with her, dear God, I was there.
‘But the sky’s all bright like gold over us, what I could see of it through the weepin’. Oh, I wept ’an wept, Master Lunnonman. All the tears that come out o’ my one eye, ’twas like the Blood Well in full flow. Never wept like that, not even when I was a babby, and Mistress Cate, she got her arms round me, and I’m broke up, broke into bits. And then her says, “Look… look, Joan”.’
Joan half risen from her chair, looking down at the fire.
‘All the mist was a driftin’ away, and her’s goin’, “See, Joan, see the fishes, see the eagle. See the stars”.’
‘Looking down?’
I felt the building turning about me like a great millwheel, a grinding of the mind.
‘And did you? Did you, Joan?’
Joan Tyrre gazed up at the smoke spiralling up the hole in the ceiling.
‘No, Master,’ she said. ‘But I d’zee most everythin’ else.’
I could scarce restrain myself from running out, down the street, back to the George, to seize Leland’s notebook.
Out of the mouths of mad women and children.
There’s a hound… and a bird, with tail fanned?
Yes, and even noblemen. My God!
‘Wazzat?’ Joan had sprung up again, scuttling across to the door and flinging it open. ‘Come out! Come outer there, you evil bazzard!’
I was up and at the door. Benlow stood there in the middle of the outer stable, the chickens flying up, Benlow’s hands up to protect his face as Joan threw something at him.
‘Spyin’ again!’ Joan screamed. ‘You fuckin’ shitlicker. Out!’
Benlow had retreated to the doorway, straw sticking to his green and yellow slashed doublet.
‘I been waiting for you to come back to me, my Lord. I can help you, see, I can help you find what you want.’
‘He’s a lyin’ bazzard,’ Joan said. ‘You don’t want nothin’ to do with him.’
‘I can help you.’ Benlow’s voice was hoarse. ‘I know who you are, and I can help you.’
‘Out! Get your sorry arse out of my house!’
There was a wafting in the air, and I saw that Joan Tyrre gripped a rusting sickle. Took another slash at Benlow and he ducked out of the door.
‘I mean it, my lord. You come see me.’
When he was gone, Joan turned back to me, in the doorway, the sickle held to her chest.
‘You stay away of him, Master. Snitchin’ bazzard, he is. Anybody lower in this town than me, then surely ’tis he. Stay away.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I probably will.’
A mistake. Though how could I have known it, all alight as I was then, with vision?
Quelling my excitement for a while, for I’d come here for information.
‘Cate Borrow,’ I said.
‘Gived me my eye back, look.’
I nodded.
‘Her and the Lord Merlin. Sees all now, this eye. Him’s better’n two eyes.’ Joan’s good eye glittering in the gloom. ‘A holy saint, that woman. Gived me my eye back, lost her own life. A holy martyr!’
‘And never gave you the dust.’
‘No need for it. Had her own magic.’
‘What did Matthew Borrow say?’
‘The doctor? Her said not to tell him.’
‘But he’d know anyway, if he was there. Would he not?’
‘Doctor weren’t there.’
‘But Joe Monger said— did not the three of you go up?’
‘Doctor weren’t there. Just us two and the Lord Merlin.’
‘Mistress Tyrre,’ I said. ‘What did Nel know of this? Does she know you were not given the dust of vision? Has she known from the beginning?’
‘Mistress Cate, her said to tell nobody. So I never did. Not till the storm come, and I knew ’twas all changed.’
‘The storm? The storm of last week?’
‘Her come to me.’
‘Nel… she came?’
Joan Tyrre will take me in. It’s no more than a hovel, but better than a dungeon.
I’d thought, the way things had turned out, that she’d gone at once to her father’s house, but Joan told me now that she hadn’t left here till close to dawn.
‘How was she? How was her mood?’
‘Mood? Oh, happy. For all they was lookin’ for her, her was happy as I’ve seen her since her was a young ’un. We sat and we talked for two hour or more…’
‘And you told her about the tor.’
‘Her said why wasn’t I out a trailin’ ole Gwyn, and I telled her ’bout Merlin and Mistress Cate.’ Joan laughed. ‘Her thought when I said Merlin I muster meant the doctor.’
‘And did you tell her… about Merlin’s secret?’
She looked at me, her head cocked on one side.
‘Merlin’s treasure,’ I said. ‘The vision of heaven.’
But she had no understanding of what I meant.
I patted her arm.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Joan.’
She beamed.
‘’Twill come, Master! Never fear.’
‘Um…?’
‘You be a late starter, but you’ll make up for that, look. You’ll marry…’ She began counting on her fingers. ‘Once… twice… thrice? Holy Lord, thrice it is! And the third – listen to me now – the third will be the finest match of all, and you know some’ing?’ She leaned forward, her exposed eye seeming to gather all the light in the place. ‘Her en’t barely born yetawhile. En’t barely born! Fine young flesh! Think on that, Master Lunnonman.’
XLVI
The Vision of Heaven
THE DISTANT SEA WAS lit the dull metallic grey of a discarded breastplate upon a battlefield, and all the land… was it changed forever?
And me?
I’d not slept for over a day, eaten not even communion bread. And now something was set out before me that I was not sure I could believe. Either I was at the heart of a great delusion or at my life’s turning point.